Four days running a real job search: the numbers

This started as one person's problem. A backend developer in São Paulo, looking for a remote role paid in dollars, and the tiring part was never the interview — it was the queue before it: reading job boards, judging whether a posting is worth the hour, filling the same Greenhouse, Lever and Workable forms over and over, then watching the inbox so a recruiter's reply does not sit unread for two days. So we built something that does the whole cycle by itself, and pointed it at that search. These are the first four days, including the part that nearly killed the project: the bill. One honest caveat first — this is a single search, so n=1.

What it actually does

Reads 11 job sites on a schedule — remote boards, company career pages, hiring platforms.
Compares every posting against the target you wrote: pay floor, time-zone overlap, stack, work-permit rules. A weak match never becomes an application.
Applies in a real browser: fills the real form with your own answers, uploads the résumé, clicks submit — saving a photo right before and right after.
Follows up: reads confirmations and recruiter replies in the mailbox, files each one where it belongs, and drafts the answer from an Answer Library you control. You send it yourself.
Flags an interview invitation the moment it lands, so nothing rots for two days. Nothing in this run had reached that stage yet; it had been four days.

Four days of real numbers

Postings read (11 job sites)	360
Matched the target	47 (13%)
Applications sent end to end	9
Recruiter replies read, filed and drafted	2
Rejections so far	2
Photos of evidence saved	230

Surprise #1 — saying no is the product

The most valuable thing it does is refuse. 87% of what it read never became an application, because a pay floor, a time-zone window or a work-permit rule failed. Each of those is a form nobody filled and a recruiter nobody spammed. The tools that promise “1,500 applications a day” invert that ratio, and it shows: recruiters can tell, and hiring software is answering with fraud detection. Applying less, and better, is the only version of this that survives contact with the people doing the hiring.

Surprise #2 — the bill

We measured the cost of every single step. The two most recent applications — same code, same expensive setup — cost $6.33 and $0.39. The expensive one re-read about 8 million blocks of page text, because filling a form means reading the page again on every turn of the loop. A longer form means more turns, more re-reading, and the cost piles up quietly.

One application, average, on the expensive setup	$3.36
The same work priced on a small, cheap one	$0.59
Judging one posting	$0.11 → $0.002 in layers
Reading one email	$0.03 → $0.0005 in layers
What a real product has to reach	≤ $0.03 per application

The honest verdict: at those prices this product cannot exist. The way down is not only “pick something cheaper” — it is a diet (strip the page to the bones of the form before reading it), a hard cap on turns, and layers: something cheap to pull facts out of a page, something better only for the decisions that need judgement. We publish these numbers because every product in this category is quietly fighting the same battle and almost nobody shows the meter.

Surprise #3 — the web is hostile, even to honest automation

Application forms sit behind Cloudflare and assorted walls, and a browser with no window is spotted instantly. What ended up working: a real Chromium with a real window, running on an invisible screen on a server, with graphics intact and nothing leaking that it is being driven. The rule we converged on: the less you fake, the less you are caught. The browser's own identity, a screen size that could physically exist, a clock that matches the exit address. Every clever disguise we tried was itself a fingerprint.

The limits we will not relax

A daily cap, always. That run was capped at 5 a day. Mass applying is spam, and the hiring side is arming itself against it.
It never invents a fact. Work permit, pay expectation, availability — the answer comes from your Answer Library, or the form is not sent.
Never your LinkedIn or Indeed account. We read the boards to find postings, but the application goes on the employer's own form. Both platforms suspend accounts for automation, and a suspended profile does not come back.
Evidence for everything. A photo before and after every submit, plus the full log of what was answered.

Where this went

Those four days became the product. The free plan sends one application a day and twenty a month, with the same evidence; Pro raises the ceiling to up to ten a day, when there is a posting worth it, and 300 a month. The prices are on Plans and pricing, and the questions people ask first are answered on the FAQ.